On
October 2, 1978 , a one-game playoff
got underway inside Fenway Park before 32,925. It was the two teams
with the
best records in baseball after 162 games – winner take all for the AL
East
title. Ex-ankee Mike
Torrez was on the mound for
Boston; Ron Guidry, the best pitcher in baseball that season, was honed in for
the Yankees.

STEVE
RYDER: Four of us went. We
expected to win that game, absolutely. The Sox had a good year, they’d
come
through.I was seven rows from the field
on the third base side directly up from the on-deck circle.

DENNIS
ECKERSLEY:
It was electric that day. I had pitched Saturday and won #20 and was
glad I
wasn’t pitching that playoff game.

I was in the dugout.I
was in the clubhouse.I was all over the
place. I was more nervous
watching than pitching. It was 2-0 in the seventh.They were setting up this little stage for
the celebration.

STEVE RYDER: Then all of a sudden:

BILL WHITE (GAME CALL)
"Deep to
left!Yastrzemski
will not get it -- it's a home run! A three-run home run for Bucky Dent and
the Yankees now lead . . . Bucky Dent has just hit his fourth home run of
the year and look at that Yankees bench out to greet
him..."

CARL YAZSTREMSKI: I've always loved
Fenway Park. But that was the one moment I hated the place, the one moment
the wall got back at us. I still can't believe it went in the
net.

BILL LEE: Torrez threw that horseshit
slider that is still sitting there in middle of the plate, and Bucky Dent
hit right near the end of the bat. I couldn’t believe he hit it out,
but he did.

ROGER
KAHN:My memory is Dent slamming
a foul ball into his foot and hobbling around and there was a delay of several
minutes. During that whole delay Mike Torrez did not throw a single
pitch.Normally, you just throw
to keep loose.Dent got a new
bat from Mickey Rivers.And the
first pitch Torrez threw after the break that may have been five minutes,
was that shot to leftfield.You
could see Yastrzemski thinking he could play the ball and kind of crumpling
when the ball wentout.

LEIGH
MONTVILLE:
It was a ball that everyone thought was going to be caught, a nothing kind
of hit.

DON ZIMMER: When Bucky hit the ball, I said, “That's an out.”
And usually you know when the ball hits the bat whether it's short, against
the wall, in the net or over the net. I see Yaz backing up, and when he's
looking up, I still think he's going to catch it. When I see him turn around,
then I know he's going to catch it off the wall. Then the ball wound up in
the net.

MIKE
TORREZ: I was so damn shocked.I thought maybe it
was going to be off the wall. Damn, I did not think it was going to go out.

BUCKY DENT: When I hit the ball,
I knew that I had hit it high enough to hit the wall. But there were shadows
on the net behind the wall and I didn't see the ball land there. I was running
from the plate because I thought I had a chance at a double. I didn't know
it was a home run until the second-base umpire signaled it was a home run.
It was an eerie feeling because the ballpark was dead
silent.

STEVE RYDER: It was just a pop fly
off Mike Torrez. Itjust made the netting. The crowd was just absolutely stunned,
absolutely stunned.

Don
Zimmer changed the Yankee shortstop's name to "Bucky
F_____g Dent." Red Sox fans were even more vulgar
in their language.

Yaz had two hits in that game, including a homer
off Ron Guidry, but he also made the last out.

DAN SHAUGHNESSY: I was covering for
the Baltimore Eagle Sun in the
second or third row.The
old press box was down low.I
was downstairs later in the stands when Gossage got Yaz to pop up because
we were getting ready to go to the locker
roomand it looked like they
were going down and that was interesting how Sox fans in those days had a
sense of gloom, anticipating.Whatever happened, it wasn’t going to end
well.

DICK
FLAVIN:I was in a box seat right
behind the Red Sox dugout. You could put your beer right on the roof. So
I had a great look of Yaz coming off the field right after he popped
up.He had his head down, anguish.

STEVE
RYDER:I saw that
popup up close.It was a fairly
high one, you could say it was a homerun in a silo.
it just ended the game ,and the people left in kind
of a dejected attitude and demeanor.Whipped.

DON
ZIMMER: Instead of going into the clubhouse, I sat in the dugout and watched
their team celebrate.

DENNIS ECKERSLEY: Yaz was crying
in the trainer’s room.It
was not as crushing for me because when you’re 23 you think, well,
we’ll do it next year.We
have such a good team. But if I knew what I know now, I would have been
devastated.We never really got
there again after that.

WALTER
MEARS:Tip O'Neill went to
Rome that
fall and saw the Pope. When he came back he was at some function with Yaz
and told him the Holy Father had spoken of him. Yaz wanted to know what the
Pope had said.

"
Tip,” he said, “How the heck
could Yastrzemski pop out in the last of the ninth with the tying run on
third? "

After the game a Bucky Dent buddy called the Red Sox inquiring if
the home-run ball was available. He was told that the net had been littered
with balls from batting-practice home runs
–the“Bucky Dent ball” could not be identified amidst
allthe
others.

JOE MOONEY: I got blamed for taking
the ball Bucky Dent hit for the home run.I never touched it. I never spoke to Bucky Dent, but later
Ifound
out that he was accusing me. I know who took that ball he
hit.But I’d never say
nothing.We’ll leave that to history.

About the author

Dr.
Harvey Frommer, a professor at Dartmouth College in the
MALS program, is in his 4ist year of writing books. A noted oral
historian and
sports journalist, he is the author of 43 sports books including the
classics:
best-selling “New York City Baseball, 1947-1957″ and best-selling
Shoeless Joe
and Ragtime Baseball,as well as his acclaimed Remembering Yankee
Stadium and
best-selling Remembering Fenway Park. His highly praised When It Was
Just a
Game: Remembering the First Super Bowl was published last fall.